The Schwartz Report

Nutanix has become the third hardware company to ink a pact with Microsoft to deliver the hybrid iteration of its Azure Cloud Platform System (CPS). Until now, only Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have offered CPS. Nutanix today announced a partnership with Microsoft to offer the CPS Standard edition. The Nutanix CPS, which will offer Microsoft Azure-consistent environments, will be available next month.

The announcement comes on the eve of Nutanix Next partner and customer conference next week in Las Vegas, where Microsoft Technical Fellow and the Lead Architect for its Enterprise Cloud Group Jeffrey Snover is scheduled to speak.

Similar to the partnerships Microsoft inked last year with Dell and HPE to offer CPS Standard based on the hybrid cloud reference architecture, the Nutanix CPS Standard will be based on a jointly-engineered solution, the company said. Also like the Dell and HPE offerings, the Nutanix system is based on Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and the Windows Azure Pack. Nutanix hyper-converged systems are best suited for organizations looking to consolidate their applications, workloads and infrastructure management on a common platform. It comes with Nutanix's Prism management platform and Acropolis VM, which the company describes as a scale-out data fabric for storage, compute and virtualization.

Like its existing hyper-converged systems, the Nutanix CPS Standard is aimed at running business critical workloads such as SQL Server, Oracle and SAP. According to Nutanix, 50 percent of all systems it sells run applications or infrastructure from Microsoft, Oracle and Splunk.

While Nutanix is not as well known as those two players, the company is a rapidly growing provider of hyper-converged systems comprised of integrated storage and compute capabilities for large scale-out workloads. Nutanix, which has OEM agreements with Dell and Lenovo and others, recently registered an initial public offering.